The present invention refers, in a first aspect, to a method of cutting a sticky, plastically deformable material, particularly an adhesive bead, and in a second aspect, to a method of mechanically applying a profiled adhesive bead to the surface of a glass pane along the edge thereof, particularly to the surface of a vehicle pane, whereby the adhesive material is extruded through a profiled extruding nozzle. In this method, the extruding nozzle is led along the edge of the glass pane by means of a robot and the extruded adhesive bead is deposited along the edge of the glass pane.
It is well known in the art to mechanically apply a profiled adhesive bead along the edge of a glass pane by extruding the adhesive material through a profiled extruding nozzle which is led by a robot along the edge of the glass pane. Thereby, the profiled adhesive bead was always deformed, i.e. had not the desired cross-sectional shape, in the region of the start and of the end of the extruding operation because a profiled adhesive bead cannot be exactly cut due to its stickiness. Besides the fact that the appearance of such an adhesive bead is not very nice, the further problem exists that e.g. a vehicle glass pane to be adhesively bonded to a frame could be not waterproof in the region of said start and end region.
Thus, according to the prior art, one was forced to manually cut off the extruded profiled adhesive bead portion not having the desired shape at the start and the end region of the extruding operation, to manually remove the cut off portions from the surface of the pane and to manually insert there a portion of adhesive bead having the desired shape. Such proceeding was not only time-consuming and expensive but really was the bottleneck in the course of an automatic manufacture of prefabricated glass panes.